SubStance

SubStance 32.2 (2003) 95-108

The Post-Exotic Connection:
Passage to Utopia

Marie-Pascale Huglo

Antoine Volodine has been called utopian, ¹ but in what sense? His flights of fancy cannot be categorized among outmoded revolutionary notions, nor among any of the "new" contemporary utopias: technological (democracy via the web, Esperanto on the Internet), scientific (equality via cloning, perfection via the genome) recreational (vacation villages, urban entertainment centers, raves), artistic (total art, art transformed into life), or others. In Volodine's work, utopia is inscribed in a discursive space that is complex and paradoxical. Established by the (utopian?) non-opposition of opposites, it juxtaposes a radical political credo and an absolute nihilism that rejects all faith in any imaginable political or religious solution. ² This utopia without hope annihilates all possibility of an ideal world, and projects the principle of futureless revolution into an imaginary and remote geography.

This is the itinerary in Volodine's most explicitly utopian journey, Le Nom des singes, which opens with the failure of the revolution and closes on the "intermittent" vision of the slum that the survivors, Golpiez and Gutierrez, sought to flee in order to establish an egalitarian commune "over there." The circular return to the point of departure reveals the journey's failure, but the "intermittent" vision makes the utopian space appear within the very circle of that failure: henceforth, the slum is situated "in the distance, beyond the territory of the spiders" who "in certain inaccessible areas of the forest [...] establish utopias that are more revolutionary and even more successful than those of the rest of us" (136). Although the expedition closes in defeat and agony, one has a glimpse of the paradoxical reality of utopia, fundamentally foreign ³ and necessarily elsewhere.

This reality has a name—"post-exotic literature"—whose alterity goes beyond the political anchorage that founds it. If the West now renounces the revolutionary principles underwritten by egalitarian and communitarian imperatives, these are inscribed as pure loss in the inaccessible and closed space of the fiction, where the community of sub-humans is established. [End Page 95] The space of this fictional world implies a political thought that sets up permanent apocalypse against the mirage of progress and liberty. But this space displaces any reference to "our" reality, in the foreignness of the fiction it establishes. ⁴ Post-exoticism maintains the space of revolution out of reach, in the circular realm of songs and accounts that expect nothing, but simply wait. (In Des Anges mineurs, a character waits for an execution that does not happen: "I felt like .... howling across the warm night that the strange is the form the beautiful takes when the beautiful is without hope, but I kept my mouth shut, and waited" [98]). Thus fiction subsumes in itself the "elsewhere" (u-topia) and the "outside of time" (u-chronia) that constitute it, without necessarily resorting to the figures of an unknown island or city, or the future. ⁵ For Volodine, literary utopia springs up after communitarian ideals and their denunciations (counter-utopias), in opposition to new utopias, in a sort of temporal prolongation that speaks the language of the dying, of phantoms, and insomniac dreamers.

Still, one wonders how the fables' foreignness makes itself intelligible without undermining its own radical alterity? How can the closed, post-exotic world be conveyed to us? ⁶ The formal configuration of the narration is in itself problematic, since, as Georges Benrekassa notes, it "affirms and refutes its desperate ambition: to transmit to us an alien word in our own language" (381). The cloistered aspect of utopia (insular or prison-like) depends, paradoxically, upon the evocation of a circumscribing passageway that sets it apart from the world. As Benrekassa reminds us, "Common sense would have it that a door is either open or closed" (382), but it is via the half-open door of the fables and by "intermittences" that we glimpse the distance between the two worlds. In Volodine's work, the sophistication of the narrative mediation is not coquettery. The emergence of these parallel territories depends...